NEWARK,
N.J. — Do recent legal decisions in Germany and the United States spell trouble
for home-schooling families? It depends on who you ask.

A
Catholic home-schooling mother of seven from New Jersey returned to court
recently to defend the academic instruction she provides her children. The
evidentiary hearing brought as part of pending divorce litigation was held
because of her husband’s concerns that their children were not receiving the
educational equivalent of a public or parochial school.

The
woman asked that her name not be used in this article.

According
to Beatrice Kandell, the woman’s attorney, Superior Court Judge Thomas Zampino
concluded that he did not have the jurisdiction to decide the home-schooling
issue and ended the hearing, apprising the husband of remedies if he desired
further resolution. He could, for example, initiate a truancy action.

Attorney
Scott Woodruff of the Home School Legal Defense Association, which is not
involved in the case, said, “The decision is binding only on the particular
individuals involved and will not have any precedent-setting effect beyond this
case.”

Yet
Woodruff is concerned about the regulatory nature of the administrative
remedies offered by the court, as well as the opinions expressed by Zampino in
the Feb. 23 decision, which he interprets as editorialized hostility toward
homeschoolers.

“The
judge expresses shock that families are not required to be monitored,” said
Woodruff, noting that “many states do not require monitoring.”

Matt
Bowman, an attorney with Alliance Defense Fund, an organization committed to
defending the rights of parents to direct the upbringing of their children,
also not a party to the divorce case, agreed.

“New
Jersey’s state law explicitly states that parents may offer equivalent
instruction at home and imposes zero regulations,” Bowman said. “They don’t
even have to tell the government they are going to home school.”

“Judge
Zampino,” Kandell explained, “commented in his opinion on what he deemed might
be deficiencies in the statute, but he can’t rule on that. Dicta are part of
the opinion but not relevant to the decision.”

Kandell
said the home-schooling mother was not disappointed with the decision. “It has
allowed her to go back to teaching her children without interference,” she
said.

Bowman
and Woodruff fear that because the decision is public information, and it is
legitimate for one court to look at what another has done and be persuaded by
it — even if the opinion does not bind another court — this case, if followed
by other judges, imposes a burden on home-schooling families that has no basis
in the law in the state of New Jersey.

The
administrative remedies presented to the husband at the evidentiary hearing
also prove troubling to the home-school advocates.

“Should
you really be saying home schoolers need to be monitored, checked, analyzed and
treated like a suspect class, when there is absolutely nothing to merit it?”
Woodruff said.

Brian
Ray of the National Home Education Research Institute, who gave expert
testimony in the case, said, “From the cases I’ve seen as an expert witness,
this judge basically said home schooling is legal in New Jersey and implied the
mother appears to be validly home educating because of the fact that he never
said she was breaking the law or harming her children. He allowed the status
quo home education to continue.”

Keeping
the status quo is exactly the problem for home schoolers in Germany where home
schooling was outlawed in 1938. Home-schooling advocates are watching
litigation in Europe closely.

“I
think that people who understand the times will realize that although America
is rich in freedom now, trends that start in Europe have a strong tendency to
jump across the pond and become rooted on this side of the Atlantic,” said
Woodruff.

“Europe
tends to be ahead of the trend implementing leftist ideology,” said Bowman,
referring to an ideology where “the state has primary rights over the
upbringing of children. That’s the ideology that is driving the German
government to [maintain] the prohibition of home schooling and use armed troops
to impose their law. Hitler had obvious reasons for imposing government
indoctrination of children,” Bowman said.

This
directly contradicts the Catholic perspective of society, where, as Bowman
indicates, “Pope John Paul II said the fundamental unit of society is the
family. The ideology behind the German law is that raising and educating
children is a job of the state first, the family second, and that the family
must yield to the state.”

“There
is not a conspiracy or a direct connection,” Bowman said, “between New Jersey
and Germany, but it is troubling that both these battles are coming to a head.
We shouldn’t be in a panic, but we should be concerned. They are of the same
kind of attitude because of the judge’s disdain of the notion that parents can
raise their children without governmental interference.”